Charles Cathcart. "Old Plays and the General Reader: an Essay in Praise of the Regents Renaissance Drama Series". Early Modern Literary Studies 14.3 (January, 2009) 5.1-36 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/14-3/Cathrege.html>.

Late in the 1970s, acting
on a teacher’s recommendation, I bought a copy of John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck,
and there on a spacious page I read the opening line,

Still to be haunted, still to be pursued,

and my love affair with old plays began. The
edition I possessed was that of the Regents Renaissance Drama Series.
It was published in Britain by Edward Arnold; Cyrus Hoy was the
general editor of the series; and the volume’s editor was D.K.
Anderson. The book cost 70 pence, which was then a significant outlay
for someone on a low weekly wage, though not so great an expense as
to prevent further purchases. The price was, I believe, a discounted
one, and many companion volumes were then available for the same sum
in the great London bookshops of Foyles and Dillon’s. I now regret
that I did not buy more of them.1

My emphasis upon the
retail price of my Perkin Warbeck is quite deliberate. In this essay I shall commend the Regents
Renaissance Drama Series and advocate its merits as a format for
presenting the texts of Renaissance plays. It is therefore fair that
I also record that the profusion of discounted copies available in
the London of thirty years ago hardly suggests a commercial viability
to match the scholarly and aesthetic qualities I shall claim for the
publishing venture.

Series volumes were
released in both Britain and the United States, where the publisher
was the University of Nebraska Press. The American series – the
senior partner in the enterprise – appeared under the imprint of
Bison Books. The text and layout were the same as that of the Edward
Arnold volumes, though the series in America did not possess the
striking cover design of the British paperbacks. These covers
displayed a detail from an embroidered bodice – a tiny detail,
blown large, in which the depiction of a bird and of a trefoil leaf
and flower with a long and curling stem was prominent. The same
illustration adorned all the paperback volumes of the British series,
variously appearing in shades of blue, pink, green, purple, and
yellow. The surname of the playwright or playwrights appeared in
lower case Roman type above the play’s title, which was in a larger
point size and in capitals. These were framed by the title of the
series, placed above and in italics, and by the editor’s name,
which appeared with the same typography below. The appearance was
spare and attractive.

The preliminaries featured a series statement by the general editor, a contents page and a list of abbreviations,
and there was also an introduction, usually of about ten pages. The
text of the play was exceptionally followed by an appendix unique to
the volume, and each edition concluded with a chronological appendix
in a standard form, again of some ten pages long. Given that the play
text itself might typically take up a hundred pages, most editions
were slim ones. A long play, such as Bartholomew
Fair, or one of the series’ six
double volumes (amongst which I include the parallel text edition of Every Man in his Humour),
would result in a plumper book, but on no occasion was a lengthy
introduction or voluminous notes responsible for an outsize
publication.

The slightness of the
Regents volumes derives in part from a certain modesty of scholarly
ambition. Regents editions record textual variants, including all
departures from the chosen copy text, on each page of the play, so
that readers may see for themselves the choices that editors have
made in preparing their text; and in this way the Regents series
matches the practice of the most authoritative editions of early
modern plays. But there is no requirement for Regents editors to
record press corrections; the analysis of an editor’s textual
decisions is succinct; and questions of provenance – that is, of
authorial attribution, date, revision, and company ownership – are
reviewed briskly rather than exhaustively. In this regard a certain
principle is usually at play for established series of Shakespearean
and non-Shakespearean drama. This applies to series of individual
plays rather than to collections of plays, and it suggests that the
more thorough the editing procedure has been, the more extensive will
be the non-textual apparatus – principally, the introduction to the
volume and the explanatory notes. In other words, a series with high
scholarly aspirations is likely to yield bulky editions. Of course,
there are exceptions to this general rule, and individual volumes
from such prestigious series as the Revels Plays or the Arden
Shakespeare have had their editorial rigour challenged; and some
volumes from series with less ambitious general standards – in the
area of textual collation for example – considerably exceed the
requirements for their series. However, viewed against the field,
Regents volumes are compact in relation to their standard of
scholarship.

A further principle
appears to operate, one that again relates to editions of single
Renaissance plays, and this also is a kind of donnèe.
It dictates a sharp division between series of plays written by
Shakespeare and series of drama composed by other Renaissance
authors. This rule, if it is fair to call it such, is observed with
remarkably few exceptions. Of course, the growing acknowledgement
that there is a substantial body of drama in which Shakespeare’s
writing sits alongside that of other dramatists means that the
principle of division is necessarily stretched.2 The inclusion of Edward III in
the Cambridge Shakespeare and of Sir
Thomas More within the Revels plays
(where its principal ascription is to ‘Munday and others’)
demonstrates this tension.3 It was anticipated by G.R. Proudfoot’s edition of The
Two Noble Kinsmen in the Regents
series, with a title page ascription to John Fletcher and William
Shakespeare.4 Recent editions by Gordon McMullan of Henry
VIII for the Arden Shakespeare and by
John Jowett of Timon of Athens for the Oxford series form perhaps the richest and most searching
editorial discussions of the critical implications of collaborative
authorship to date; and both McMullan and Jowett place a special
stress upon the contributions of Shakespeare’s collaborators, John
Fletcher and Thomas Middleton.5 The context of both editions, however, is that of a dedicated series
of Shakespeare’s writing.

This publishing distinction between the drama of
Shakespeare and of his contemporaries is no doubt fired by the
financial and marketing pressures and opportunities to which
publishing houses must necessarily respond. However, it increasingly
lacks either a rationale of critical and theoretical substance or
even a straightforwardly practical and common sense division into a
single coherent authorial corpus and a remainder. In certain ways the
Regents series appears outmoded, but in this regard it has not as yet
been supplanted by innovative successors.

Despite the presence of The
Two Noble Kinsmen within the Regents
canon, the series was effectively a collection of non-Shakespearean
drama. Yet it was not avowedly such an enterprise, for its series
statement simply describes its range as ‘the more significant plays
of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline theatre’. Perhaps this
reflects a tendency for university English departments in the 1960s,
when the Regents series got under way, to adopt ‘Jacobean Drama’
or ‘Elizabethan Drama’ courses that stood alongside, but did not
overlap with, a ‘Shakespeare’ course. The Regents series
statement does not profess any design to meet the needs of student
readers, but the back covers of earlier Arnold paperbacks announce
that the series is ‘intended for use in universities and the upper
forms of schools’.6 Given this early purpose, the range of plays to appear within the
Regents series has its oddities. (A bibliography may be viewed by
title, by
title page author and by
year of publication.) The
forty-three volumes of the series unearth many neglected plays of
excellence and produce new and sometimes notable editions of more
celebrated plays, yet there is no place for The
Alchemist, Doctor
Faustus, The
Duchess of Malfi, Edward
II, Volpone or Women Beware Women.
Given the high canonical place these plays have occupied during the
past fifty years, the omission is striking. However, an early account
by Cyrus Hoy of the plans for the series makes clear that the Regents
canon was designed to have a yet wider scope than it actually
attained.7 The published series, in its finished state, clearly diverges from
the lists of the principal competitors to the Regents series: the New
Mermaids and the Revels Plays. Although Edward
II was a relatively late addition to
the Revels series, appearing in 1994, each of the six plays has
enjoyed a paperback release for both the New Mermaids and the Revels
series; and Malfi, Volpone and Women Beware Women all
appear within the Revels Student Editions. Faustus,
indeed, holds a unique place within the Revels series, for it is the
only play to have received a second edition; or, rather, a new
edition which (unlike John Jump’s volume of 1962) presents two
alternative texts, each based on a different early modern
publication.8 The later volume responds not only to a changing view about the
inception of the different Renaissance texts but also to a shift in
thinking about the intellectual basis upon which modern editions are
built.

This single Revels
instance of a new volume – and essentially a replacement volume,
for the publisher, Manchester University Press, has not continued to
release Jump’s edition – is the sole example of an approach which
the New Mermaids have adopted as a matter of policy. The New
Mermaids, which commenced their operation at around the time that the
Regents series began to appear, have continued for over forty years
to develop their list. Some plays have fallen by the wayside with the
result that such editions as those of James
IV and Sejanus
His Fall have not persisted in print.9 On the other hand, plays with a rich critical and performance history
in the intervening years have received new editions, and this
includes each of the six plays named as significant omissions from
the Regents series.10

In this way, therefore,
the New Mermaids have been able to renew themselves. Through
selective additions to their list and by selectively replacing or
updating individual editions they have been able not only to
accommodate new scholarship and shifting critical perspectives upon
plays that have long held a high canonical place but to respond to
changing notions of what that canon should be. It is presumably for
this reason that The Roaring Girl has
been for a second time edited for the New Mermaids.11 The same play also appeared within the Revels Plays, for which it was
first published in 1987.12 Manchester University Press have responded to the way that concerns
of gender, sexuality and race have permeated English studies in
recent decades more clearly through the Revels Plays Companion
Library, which has released volumes such as Three
Jacobean Witchcraft Plays and Three
Renaissance Travel Plays, and the
Revels Student Editions, one of which is titled Plays
on Women.13

Whatever changes
of emphasis the Revels series may have experienced over the fifty
years of its life, it has maintained a degree of detachment from the
shifts of intellectual fashion that have taken place over this
period. Nevertheless, the very length of time through which the
series has been sustained means that its volumes have a span of
generations. One achievement of the series has been to release many
of Ben Jonson’s plays. Indeed, the Revels series has partly
anticipated the forthcoming Cambridge
Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson as a
concerted effort to provide a modern alternative to Herford and
Simpson. The Revels volumes, with the dates of their first
publication, are these: Bartholomew Fair (1960), The Alchemist (1967), Eastward Ho (1979), Volpone (1983), The New Inn (1984), The Staple of News (1988), Sejanus His Fall (1990), The Devil is an Ass (1994), Poetaster (1995), TheMagnetic Lady (2000), Every Man In His Humour (2000), Every Man Out of His Humour (2001), Epicene; or, The Silent Woman (2003).14 The rate of new additions to this corpus has speeded up, and only a
single edition, that of the collaborative Eastward
Ho, appeared between 1967 and 1983; but
in general this effort has been consistent and gradual, extending to
date for over forty-three years.

This forms a striking contrast with the
development of the Regents series. The first Regents volume released
by Edward Arnold appeared in 1964. By the end of the decade the great
majority of the Regents editions were in print. A few volumes
appeared in the early 1970s, but it was a
venture with fruits that largely appeared in the 1960s. The ‘Revels
Jonson’ on the other hand commenced four years prior to the first
British Regents play and it continues to expand. In this way the
Revels Plays, like the New Mermaids, have adapted to changing
academic priorities. The Revels Bartholomew
Fair is by no means a redundant
edition, and the recent Epicene is
not modish in its concerns; yet it is instructive to see how
different in tone and in content are the introductions to the two
volumes, for Jonson’s twin comic achievements might otherwise sit
neatly together as companion plays.

The Regents series, on the other hand, is firmly
located within a narrow range of time and it is animated by a set of
scholarly and critical values that reflects this period. Of course,
the different volumes of the series also mirror the styles and
concerns of their various editors; but the individual editing
projects were undertaken within a shared academic context. There are
certain ways in which this endeavour now appears dated. But it is
worth saying first that there is a modernity to the series. Before
the 1960s, Renaissance plays were largely available to readers in
books that were either heavy and academic, or spare, highbrow and
largely without annotation.

An example of the former might be Thomas Marc
Parrott’s great edition of George Chapman’s plays. There is a
lively and unfussy air to Parrot’s introductions and notes, and the
achievement of this edition is perhaps worthy of comparison with that
of the Herford–Simpson Jonson in its thoroughness and its legacy to
later scholars, yet the reading experience it yields is altogether
shaped by the material forms in which the edition exists. Chapman’s
comedies, for example, comprising one part of the edition, have been
published in a heavy double volume, and also in a lighter single
volume in which ten plays and a masque, together with their various
introductions and notes, all appear.15 Neither offers a pleasant way of enjoying these plays.

In contrast to this, the original Mermaids series
of Renaissance plays was a popular venture. Largely arranged by
author, this was essentially a series of selected plays. There was
little suggestion that these selections were arbitrary, for the
editions appeared as ‘The Best Plays
of’ the author in question. The
selections are introduced with a biographical memoir, one which
typically includes pithy summaries of the genre and the narrative
content of the plays presented and makes an estimate of the likely
interest they will hold for their readers. These assessments are
forthrightly evaluative. The editors were often well known literary
figures, and Arthur Symons, Havelock Ellis and Algernon Charles
Swinburne are amongst them. The volumes are compact, printed on thin
paper, and the text is readably set with a generous typeface. The
editions do not have a scholarly format. They offer minimal
annotation and there is little effort to offer a provenance for the
text or to explain the editorial procedures. They most resemble
Everyman’s occasional editions of Renaissance plays and they
certainly seem to be marketed at a lay readership.

These then were the principal
options for reading Renaissance drama when the first Regents volumes
were released in the mid-1960s. The first volumes of the Revels Plays
were newly in print and the early New Mermaids appeared as the first
Regents volumes were emerging. The short-lived Fountainwell series,
which offered single Renaissance plays in old-spelling editions,
became available at the same time. The profusion of new editions to
emerge in the 1960s was a charged cultural phenomenon. The expansion
of higher education, an enhanced regard for accessibility, of which
the growth in paperback use was a part, an increase in personal
spending power and developments in technology, both of which also
contributed to the rise of the paperback: all of these are familiar
as aspects of the ‘long sixties’ (to use Arthur Marwick’s
term). The greater availability of Elizabethan plays was one offshoot
of these social changes.16 In certain ways, too, classics of the Renaissance drama had an appeal
to the tastes of the time. Perhaps a heightened attention to John
Webster’s plays, or to The Revenger’s
Tragedy, had its counter-cultural
aspect; and perhaps also the plays of Jonson and Chapman were less
likely to gain new admirers during the sixties.

The Regents series was
largely confined to this decade. Friar
Bacon and Friar Bungay, the single play
to appear in 1963 in America, was one of five volumes published in
the British debut year of 1964. By the end of the decade the flow of
new editions was slackening, and the final volume released by Edward
Arnold, Middleton and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel, came
out in England in 1977, a year after its release by the University of
Nebraska Press. Uniquely, as I believe, No Wit, No Help Like a
Woman’s was released only in America; and this publication also
took place in 1976.

As Table 1 indicates, the Regents series was one which emerged in little over a
decade; indeed, in both Britain and America over two-thirds of
Regents volumes were published from 1964 to 1968. The series was
therefore a venture that fell within a narrow range of time: it
neither established its style over an extended period, as did the
Revels Plays, nor updated and revivified itself in the manner of the
New Mermaids. This certainly left the Regents canon with an outdated
air, for its choice of plays is hardly one to address an interest in
sexual politics, or queer theory, or race and cultural difference, or
eco-criticism, and is only partly one to enlighten questions of power
and resistance. I have mentioned those omissions from its corpus that
seem surprising, given its stated intention to present ‘the more
significant’ plays of the period. Academic readers today might note
the absence of The Island Princess, Mariam, A Woman
Killed with Kindness or The Witch of Edmonton. Indeed, the
absence of domestic drama leaves a notable gap within the series,
especially given the appearance of the Penguin Three Elizabethan
Domestic Tragedies in 1969.17 Instead, the inclusions within the Regents series are often classical
in temper, and All Fools, Catiline, and The Wounds
of Civil War are amongst them. Attempting to place the series
within the cultural values of the 1960s may partly illuminate its
genesis; but doing so would also fail to acknowledge what is
traditional about the venture. Perhaps the 1960s rediscovery of Early
Music may form a fair analogy, for in that movement a cherishing of
what had once been a narrowly antiquarian taste had a focus in the
quest for authenticity; and in the attempt to slough off the
obfuscation of the intervening years a new attitude to the artistic
creations of the Renaissance emerged, one that sought to understand
and in some measure to recreate the conditions in which the works
were first composed.18

The Early Music revival, however, aspired to become a popular as
well as a scholarly fashion. To what extent was the new availability
of scholarly editions of Renaissance plays in modern paperback form
also a popularizing venture? Clearly, the growing student population
was a principal target, whether or not the Regents list was well
placed to reach that target. So too was the professional scholarly
community; and the various play texts furnished by the Regents, the
Revels, and the New Mermaids quickly became the editions of choice
for most scholars. But the slim and elegant volumes of the Regents
series, as well as the release of every New Mermaids edition and many
of the Revels plays in paperback, testify to a marketing strategy
that at least entertains the possibility of a non-specialist
readership.

There was a counterpart to this modernizing tendency in the
publication of Renaissance drama. This was the massive growth in
productions of old plays that gathered pace in the 1960s as the
fringe theatres of London grew and that reached its height in the
1970s and 1980s; that had its reflection in provincial repertories;
that continues, if less insistently, to this day; and of which the
‘Read not Dead’ series run by Globe Education may be deemed an
outgrowth.19 This meant that many plays for which there was no recorded
performance since Restoration times, or even earlier, or in some
cases ever, were realized on stage. The early Revels editions had a
dedicated note upon each play’s stage history. This note frequently
recorded a blank in modern times – and yet in many cases this has
since been rectified.20 It is not easy to say what was cause, what was effect, and what was a
common response to the social and academic changes associated with
the sixties. It seems clear, however, that the sudden growth in
modern academic editions of Renaissance plays and the parallel
staging of the same repertoire were connected happenings. Of course,
many productions may have reached a public less effectively than even
an obscure edition; and I have strong memories of being in a tiny
audience easily outnumbered by the players of Tamburlaine the
Great, part two. Yet the growth and range of performed early
modern drama in modern times has meant that readers and non-readers
of Renaissance plays have had opportunities to see plays performed
that no generation since Stuart times has experienced.

And readers of the Regents Renaissance Drama
Series have had their access to many early modern
texts made sweet to them. The concise and selective annotation is
available to the reader on the same page as the text. It is rare for
these notes to be so extensive as to challenge the play’s text for
primacy on a given page. The modest point size of the dialogue –
itself greater than that of the annotations below – together with
the wide margins of each page enables the dialogue to have an
appearance at once elegant and clear. The use of capitals for speech
headings and the generous indentation of the lines to be spoken allow
the layout of a play’s text to achieve a clear indication of speech
divisions. No doubt there is a subjective element to my sense that
the Regents series attains a more pleasing arrangement of its texts
than do its principal competitors; and I freely acknowledge that this
is a largely inauthentic gracefulness, for most early modern quartos
present a cluttered appearance. Yet the achievements of the Regents
series in presenting its texts pleasantly are considerable. The wide
margins allow prose dialogue to appear with a degree of spaciousness;
and for plays written predominantly in verse there is a special
elegance. In Donald K. Anderson’s edition of The
Broken Heart, a companion volume to Perkin Warbeck,
the match between text and publication form is sublime. The cool
precision of Ford’s verse acquires a visual form of corresponding
beauty. Ford’s language, his syntax, and his range of allusion are
likely to be, for us, relatively accessible, and so the sparing
extent of Anderson’s explanatory notes is helpful to the general
effect; and the Regents Catiline,
for example, suffers a little by comparison, whereas such editions as
the series’ Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay or Antonio’s
Revenge do not.

Antonio’s Revenge and its companion volume, Antonio and
Mellida, possess introductions by their
editor, G.K. Hunter, that use the narrow canvas of the Regents format
with exceptional verve. Marston’s critics have sometimes found the
task of introducing a single play, as opposed to reviewing the
dramatist’s oeuvre,
an aid to their endeavour. Hunter approaches the two plays winningly,
seeking to identify what is exceptional about each one, rather than
to address all of the many points of interest the plays hold for both
scholars and critics. And the very brevity of his assessment means
that items of particular insight – that the analogy of opera may
help the reader to approach Antonio and
Mellida and that Antonio’s
Revenge may better reward its students
if they attend to ritual rather than to psychology or morality –
are unlikely to be lost.

Typically, a Regents introduction would
succinctly review the provenance of the
play in question, commenting upon any matters of uncertainty about
its inception or revision, and at their best these discussions
possess the limpidity of a helpful scholarly note. This, together
with a comment upon the play’s text, with which it might be
combined, and an observation upon stage history, is almost invariably
subordinated to an overview of the play itself. This might comment
upon the formal properties of the play, as when Cyrus Hoy commences
his discussion of The City Madam by
saying, ‘Comedy, by definition, is concerned with representing the
ridiculous’ (p. xii). Other volumes might give prominence to the
milieu of the action; and Edward Partridge attends first to records
of the Bartholomew Fair that gave a title and a setting for Jonson’s
play (p. x), whereas the ‘news industry’ is the initial focus for
attention when The Staple of News is introduced by Devra Rowland Kiefer (p. xi). Eliot, or Swinburne,
or Dryden, might be cited as a critical point of reference, but
Regents editors tend not be exercised by the critical heritage of the
plays they introduce. Indeed, on reading the introductions today one
may be struck with the absence of self-consciousness about the
editorial role, and this is one of the features to make the Regents
plays so clearly the products of their time.

Given that the Regents series was conceived,
prepared and released during the years just before the growth of new
historicism, the standard appendix – a kind of timeline – shows a
prescient concern for the social and political context of the plays.
In this appendix, titled ‘Chronology’, a left hand column sets
out ‘Political and Literary Events’
while on the right a second column offers details of the ‘Life
and Works’ of the play’s writer or
writers. The ‘Events’
are a standard feature, running from 1558 (‘Accession of Queen
Elizabeth. Thomas Kyd born. Robert Greene born.’) and usually
extending to 1666 (‘Fire of London. Death of Shirley.’). It reads
oddly nowadays. The yoking together of miscellaneous events seems to
hint at possible connections and occasionally (as with 1666) delivers
them. Generally, however, the effect is that of the Diary and Proverb
Book used by Arrietty in Mary Norton’s The
Borrowers.21

If some aspects of the Regents format seem passé,
its choice of plays, whilst never striving for fashionability,
triumphantly achieves a pioneering brilliance.22 Richard Brome is yet to achieve recognition with the Revels and New
Mermaids series, and for this reason the Regents editions of The
Antipodes and The Jovial Crew are the more valuable.
Until David Crane’s New Mermaids edition of The
Dutch Courtesan appeared in 1997,
Martin Wine’s Regents edition was the only modern-spelling and
single-volume edition of the play. Marston, however, was generally
well served by modern editions in the 1960s and 1970s, but there was
little competition for the Regents release of four plays by George
Chapman, three of which were amongst his often unregarded comedies.
Ethel M. Smeak’s edition of The
Widow’s Tears anticipated Akiro
Yamada’s Revels edition by almost a decade, thus releasing in a
modern edition a gem amongst the brilliant compositions of the first
Jacobean years. But even this achievement is surpassed by Frank
Manley’s edition of All Fools and
Smith’s of The Gentleman Usher.
As with the Regents trilogy of plays by John Ford, these verse
comedies appear to great advantage in their Regents homes, and the
editorial attention to the artifice of All
Fools and to contemporary accounts of
the gentleman usher’s role is felicitous indeed.

The twin publication in
the mid-sixties of the early Middleton comedies, A
Mad World, My Masters and Michaelmas
Term, especially when buttressed by the
New Mermaids A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1968), gave these early plays a
modern form, thereby offering a vivid context for the growing sense
of the first post-war decades that The
Revenger’s Tragedy might correctly be
viewed as a Middleton play.23 This invited a new openness to the realism, as opposed to the
grotesqueries, of the tragedy; and this was a point well made by Lawrence J. Ross in introducing The
Revenger’s Tragedy, although the
Regents edition of 1966–67 placed Tourneur’s name upon its title
page.

And one further local
achievement of the series is Hoy’s own Regents edition of
Massinger’s The City Madam.
This is one of those editions to exploit most fully the spareness and
elegance of the Regents format; and the accessibility of the text
gains an unobtrusive backing through Hoy’s light and helpful
annotation and through his introduction, in which a rich
understanding of the play’s dramatic heritage sits alongside an
approachable and perceptive account of the play’s developing impact
as it proceeds. As so often with the Regents series, the value of the
edition lies partly in its very existence. 1964, the year of The
City Madam’s Regents publication,
also saw the appearance of the New Mermaids A
New Way to Pay Old Debts. And for over
forty years since then, no major series of individual plays released
a drama by Philip Massinger.24

Those who, like myself, hold the Regents series in high regard will have a particular admiration for
the work of Cyrus Hoy’s general editorship. Readers with an
interest in questions of authorial agency will be aware of the way
that Hoy’s contributions to attribution study helped to lend the
pursuit an objectivity and transparency it had frequently lacked; and
those who have consulted his magnificent Introductions,
Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in ‘The Dramatic Works of Thomas
Dekker’ are likely to have found their reading greatly
enriched.25 These scholarly endeavours are towering ones, yet for me they are
surpassed by the shaping and oversight of the Regents venture.

In celebrating the many individual achievements
of the Regents series, I do not mean to downplay those of its
competitors, as my mentions of the New Mermaids editions of A
Trick and A
New Way seek to indicate. In
particular, the substance of individual Revels editions, together
with the Revels’ position as the pre-eminent academic host of
individual editions of non-Shakespearean plays, give the release of
each individual volume a kind of momentousness. Their sponsorship of
Jonson’s plays, reviewed above, constitutes a powerful and
continuing reaffirmation of Jonson’s corpus. Readers will hold
varying views as to which releases of Revels plays were the most
significant, and my own list would certainly include the twin
appearance in 1986 of James Shirley’s The
Cardinal and The
Lady of Pleasure, marking a new
assertion of interest in Shirley and in Caroline drama and following
two years after Martin Butler’s Theatre
and Crisis, 1632–1642; John
Margeson’s edition of Chapman’s Byron plays, a volume that aligns not only
with the period’s new historicist bias but with the burgeoning
interest in the censorship of plays; and Tom Cain’s Poetaster,
which heralded a renewed interest in the ‘Poets’ War’.26

A sense of the monumentality of the Revels Plays, against which I choose to contrast the
slightness of Regents series, acknowledges the way that the Revels
series explicitly states its derivation from the Arden Shakespeare.
Successive prefaces by the Revels general editors credit the
initiator of the series, Clifford Leech, with an attempt to replicate
the success of ‘the New Arden Shakespeare’.27 By the ‘New Arden’ the second Arden series is meant. Now a third
Arden series is being released; and Arden have announced a new
venture, the ‘Arden Early Modern Drama’. ‘Modelled
entirely on the Third Series in appearance, style and pricing’,
this new series of non-Shakespearean plays will take its cue from the
third, rather than, as with the Revels, the second Arden
manifestation.28 By mirroring the format of the third Arden Shakespeare, the series
promises at least partly to bridge the chasm between the publication
of Shakespeare’s plays and those of his peers. This will not be the
first new series of non-Shakespearean plays to emerge since the
Regents, the Revels and the New Mermaids established themselves. The
Revels have introduced a parallel series, the Revels Student
Editions, in which the texts are substantially those of the senior
Revels series, but which have truncated, critically updated, and less
overtly scholarly introductions. Moreover, Nick Hern books have
brought out the ‘Globe Quartos’. These, like the large format
Nottingham Drama texts of the 1970s and 1980s, usually present
Renaissance plays obscure enough to have found no place in the more
established series. The Globe Quartos advertise a connection with the
repertory of the restored Globe theatre in London or with the staged
readings of the ‘Read not Dead’ series. Of all these ventures,
the Globe Quartos approach most closely to the aesthetic qualities of
the Regents series.

Nevertheless, the Arden Early Modern Drama will
be a highly significant new entrant into the field of rival series.
Clearly, its principal competitor will be the Revels Plays. Indeed,
given the shared origin within the Arden tradition, there will be a
common heritage to the two series. The Revels Plays have previously
been distinct from the parallel ventures into non-Shakespearean
drama. This derives from what I have called their ‘monumentality’:
they have aspired to a breadth of annotation and a richness of
introductory material. In the competition I envisage, the Arden and
the Revels series appear set to become the principal, the most
prestigious, and the most authoritative outlets for single volumes of
non-Shakespearean Renaissance plays. Given this shared derivation
from the Arden Shakespeare tradition, the rivalry may involve two
ventures that prize what is abundant above what is concise.

The balance between
text and exposition remains a crucial consideration for those who
sponsor scholarly editions. The outcome of the editorial choices that
are made will shape the reading experiences at stake. The work
of a general editor has recently drawn the reflective consideration
of Stanley Wells, who places his work upon the Penguin Shakespeare
and the Oxford Shakespeare within the context of recent and
competitive single-volume editions of Shakespeare. Essentially, Wells
has reviewed the first section of the binary divide between the work
of Shakespeare and that of his peers. He assesses the challenges of
shaping a series of individual plays from the perspective of his own
role, as his title – ‘On Being a General Editor’ – makes
clear, and Wells sets out the various considerations that led to the
New Penguin and the Oxford Shakespeares adopting the formats they
did.29

The account is an absorbing and a human one. This partly derives
from a light but pervasive sense of a rich editorial tradition, and
Wells honours the scholarly heritage of Shakespeare editing at the
same time as he sketches the concerns that would shape his own
oversight of the two series of Shakespearean plays. In particular,
the many-sided collaborations that lie behind such a series become
apparent. ‘The first and perhaps most important task of a General
Editor is to lay down the principles to which he and his publisher
wish his edition to conform’, Wells writes, and this joint task of
publisher and general editor (where both roles may themselves be
shared ones) forms one of many areas for decision concerning the
style and appearance of the series and the content of individual
editions. Wells is clear about the considerations that may affect,
first, the publishing partners of the general editorial team, and
second, the editors of single plays within a series. He writes:

The publisher’s wishes are vital. Editions have to be financed, and
it is the publisher who provides the financial backing. This does not
mean that an edition needs to be driven by commercial considerations
alone. Shakespeare can be a status symbol. Publishing houses may feel
that their lists are incomplete if they do not include an edition of
his works. They – by which one has to mean a number of individuals
within the publishing house who are responsible for its policy –
may even acknowledge a duty to provide the scholarly community with
editions which fulfil their needs but are unlikely to make a profit.
This is especially likely to be true of scholarly publishing houses,
though I have yet to encounter a publisher who was oblivious to
financial considerations. (p. 39)

With regard to colleagues responsible for individual volumes, Wells
says:

There are times when I have observed with a sigh that an editor,
having failed, for example, to observe the proposed word limits, has
written a monograph rather than an Introduction, but not had the
heart to wield the blue pencil too drastically. (p. 48)

Considerations of status, of service and of profit are only three of
the concerns a publisher may feel; and a possible tendency to
profusion is only one of the challenges that a volume editor must
face. But the vivid way in which Wells displays the twin challenges
of rigour and delicacy that may affect a general editor’s team
working throws a sharp light on the pressures that may shape the
development of a major series. Such a series may, for the publisher,
be a kind of exercise in grandeur: that is, one motive for the
fashioning of an authoritative edition may be that the prestige of
the publishing house may grow. (Indeed, a few years after acquiring
my Perkin Warbeck, when calling at Edward Arnold’s London
offices to enquire where any unsold volumes might be found, I noticed
that a set of paperback volumes of the Regents series was prominently
displayed within a glass cabinet in the entrance lobby.) And for an
academic editor of a single volume, sheer enthusiasm might well
prompt a detailed introduction; and the commission also offers an
opportunity to place in the public domain a notable and authoritative
edition, one which may enhance the scholar’s reputation. In other
words, collaborators on both the publishing and the editorial side
might alike be motivated by considerations that militate against the
slightness and simplicity I claim for the Regents series.

Publishers and editors might well consider this point to have been
too strongly made, and both may rightly assert that they conduct
their work with the ease and pleasure of their readers in mind.
Nevertheless, the kinds of negotiation Wells points to indeed suggest
that an editorial care for an entire series may have to contend with
pressures that tend towards the weighty and away from the concise. Of
course, it may be argued that market pressures are the most efficient
mechanism for securing a fit between product and consumer; but
whatever force such an argument may have, it can apply only fitfully
to companies, such as a subsidized university press, with aims that
are not narrowly directed to the making of money. The quest for
‘monumentality’ is a case in point, for the aspiration is not
necessarily located in either the profit motive, nor the public good,
nor even the fostering of pure scholarship.

Readers may perhaps detect a mismatch in the advocacy for what is
friendly to the reader in a modern version of an old play and the
qualities of the Regents series that are here celebrated. The Regents
series, while elegant, is determinedly unshowy; though concise, its
editions are certainly scholarly rather than popular in temper; and
as I mentioned at the start of this essay, their paperback release
was clearly not so widely in demand as to preclude their availability
in Britain at least on the basis of a discounted price. No doubt the
Regents series had its oddities, and as this discussion has sought to
show, it was for good or ill finely shaped by the period of its
inception. Yet it remains, I suggest, a uniquely pleasing form of
presenting Renaissance plays to its readership: a form at once
elegant, lucid, and chaste.

Bibliography

A.
Regents Renaissance Drama Series: Listed by play title, by title page
author, and by publication year.

Where two
years are given, the first relates to the publication date in the
U.S.A. and the second to the publication date in the U.K. Otherwise
(except as stated with regard to No Wit, No Help, Like a Woman’s)
the single date applies to publication in both countries. In the
U.S.A. the publisher in all cases is the University of Nebraska Press
and the place of publication, Lincoln, Nebraska. In the U.K. the
publisher in all cases is Edward Arnold and the place of publication
London.

Table 1: Number of new Regents play texts released by
year in America and Britain

Year

Volumes
published in the USA(University
of Nebraska Press)

Volumes published in Britain(Edward Arnold)

1963

1

0

1964

6

5

1965

6

6

1966

8

5

1967

5

9

1968

4

5

9169

3

0

1970

3

6

1971

2

0

1972

1

2

1973

0

1

1974

1

0

1975

1

1

1976

2

1

1977

0

1

Notes

1 A full bibliography of Regents Renaissance
volumes may be viewed by
title, by
title page author and by
year of publication.
Citations of Regents editions are not made individually within
footnotes, and editorial text directly cited is noted
parenthetically by page number. The roughly contemporaneous Regents
Restoration Drama Series formed a companion venture.

2 See, for example, Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A
Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

4 Proudfoot has since become the senior general editor of the third
Arden Shakespeare series. His 1968 edition of The Two Noble
Kinsmen prefigured the inclusion of several collaborative works
within the third Arden series.

5 McMullan, ed., King Henry VIII (All Is True) by William
Shakespeare and John Fletcher (London: Thomson Learning, 2000), pp.
180–99; Jowett, ed., The Life of Timon of Athens, by
William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), pp. 144–53. Lois Potter’s edition of The Two
Noble Kinsmen (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1997)
names John Fletcher and William Shakespeare upon its title page.

6 The same intention is stated on the equivalent hardback dustcovers.
Later volumes omit this reference to educational institutions. The
American Bison paperback volumes I have seen also omit any such
reference.

7 See Hoy, ‘The Regents Renaissance Drama Series’, Research
Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 8 (1965), 10–14. Hoy names The Alchemist, Faustus, Malfi, Women Beware Women and Volpone (but not Edward II) amongst the projected
volumes of the series. I am very grateful to Bill Lloyd for pointing
out to me this article and also for his careful and perceptive
comments upon an earlier draft of this essay.

22 Hoy, ‘Regents’, 13–14, mentions a total of 19 plays planned
for the series but which have not reached publication. In addition
to those noted elsewhere, they comprise A Chaste Maid in
Cheapside, The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, the two Byron plays, May Day,Love’s Sacrifice, The Lover’s
Melancholy, The Atheist’s Tragedy, The Court Secret, Mother Bombie and Campaspe.

24 Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, ed. T. W. Craik
(London: Ernest Benn, 1964). Since this essay was first drafted,
Martin White’s Revels edition of The Roman Actor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) has appeared.

25 Hoy, ‘The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont
and Fletcher Canon (I)’, Studies in Bibliography, 8 (1956),
129–46, and Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in
‘The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker’, 4 vols (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980).